Xbox Live is getting competitive gaming features this month in the form of the Arena, which is a portal where players can find and sign up for tournaments for free-to-play shooter World of Tanks. Other games will use the Arena in the future. Microsoft’s online gaming service will now also finally enable players to add their own custom images as their identifying gamerpics. The company is also improving how it is sorting games and apps for Xbox One owners. These features will roll out to select people who are participating in the Xbox Insider Program for beta testing new patches on Xbox One.

For the Arena, the Wargaming studio (which makes games like World of Warships and publishes others such as Master of Orion) and esports organization ESL are running the competitions. By signing up for the events, Xbox Live will notify you when your tournament is starting. The service will also automatically report the results, which is an improvement over the player-reported results on some other third-party tournament sites. After your match, you may also share your wins on your Xbox Live activity feed to brag to your friends.

In addition to the custom gamerpics, the Xbox One profile and activity feed is getting a “Join broadcast” button. This will enable you to instantly jump to a livestream of one of your friends. You can now also hide and pin posts in your activity feed. Microsoft is also expanding the tools for its Clubs and Looking For Group features that should make it easier to create posts and customize the look of your gamer congregation. Most notably, players can start a Looking For Group session from the Achievement page or from a Game Hub or Club Hub, and clubs can now have custom images and backgrounds.

Finally, Microsoft is also further improving browsing your game library. Under the My Games and Apps section, where all of your Xbox One software ends up, you may now sort by platform. If you only want to see backward compatible Xbox 360 games, you can now choose to do that.

Above: Sorting by platform.

Image Credit: Microsoft

While these features are entering testing in the next couple of weeks, they should roll out to everyone else soon after that.

At its Interconnect conference in Las Vegas today, IBM announced the launch of IBM Cloud Object Storage Cold Vault, a service for storing data that only needs to be served up occasionally. The service is available now.

A cold storage service with “pay as you use” pricing, called IBM Cloud Object Storage Flex, will become available in the second quarter of this year, IBM said in a statement.

The thing is, these services are becoming available nearly five years after the biggest public cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), introduced a cold storage service. Amazon Glacier arrived in August 2012. The No. 2 public cloud, Microsoft Azure, added a Cool Blob storage option last year. Google, who operates the No. 3 public cloud, came out with Cloud Storage Nearline cold storage in 2015.

IBM’s Cold Vault, meanwhile, is “designed to lead the category for cold data recovery times among major competitors,” IBM said. The service starts at 1.1 cents per GB per month, not including outgoing network bandwidth and application programming interface (API) requests. But AWS Glacier starts at 0.4 cents per GB per month, not including retrieval, API requests, and data transfer charges.

Kidoz, a network for kids to discover content, has grown in the past year from 1 million monthly active users to 50 million.

That is astounding growth for the Netanya, Israel-based company. Kidoz started out as a closed platform, providing apps in a protected environment for kids on smartphones that complied with the Child Online Privacy Protection Act, which limits communication in apps for children under 13. Kidoz locks a smartphone so that a child can only play within the Kidoz browser, which has content only for kids.

In January 2016, Kidoz opened the network of games, videos, and other apps to third-party kids app developers. By using the Kidoz software development kit, the developers can generate revenue for their apps in a kid-friendly way. After that, usage exploded.

Kidoz saw that a broken ecosystem existed where great games were coming out, but it was hard to make money. Kidoz helped solve the monetization and distribution problems. At the moment, Kidoz is pre-installed on devices from more than 40 top makers and carriers, including Lenovo, Acer, TCL, Hisense, and Deutsche Telekom.

Above: Kidoz provides games, videos, and other apps to children.

Image Credit: Kidoz

The Kidoz operating system created a kid-friendly and secure environment to discover apps, videos, and websites. Since launching the SDK, the network now includes more than 1,500 of top kids’ apps and has grown to 50 million active monthly users.

The monetization works via content-recommendation features, which developers incorporate within their own apps. That enables them to receive compensation for their work while keeping users engaged with content — games, videos, and apps — that gain recommendations on a customized basis.

Above: Kidoz content.

Image Credit: Kidoz

Top brands in the kids space including Nickelodeon, Nintendo, Hasbro, PBS Kids, and Sprout are using the Kidoz network to reach and engage young people with their branded content. They provide the advertising money that is used to compensate the content developers. Kidoz provides a mixture of organic recommendations and sponsored content from kid-oriented brands. It gives 70 percent of the revenues to the developers.

“When we launched the Kidoz Network, demand was immediate. It was like flicking a power switch and completing the circuit the industry was waiting for,” said Gai Havkin, CEO of Kidoz, in a statement. “By opening the Network to top kids’ app developers, we can now help the 50 million kids, and counting, who are active in the Kidoz ecosystem discover great content.”

Kidoz was founded in 2009 as Havkin created a private project for his daughter, so she could have a safe environment where she could explore new content. She loved it, as did her friends, so Havkin started Kidoz on his own for a few years. About four years ago, he ported the platform to mobile and started getting traction with pre-loaded kids modes on various devices.

The company has 20 employees, and it has raised $4.5 million to date from investors including Dov Moran, Lool Ventures, Millhouse, and CiG.

Maria Karaivanova Joins as Principal and Alice Ryder as Director of Investor Relations and Business Development

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 20, 2017–

Madrona Venture Group, an early-stage venture capital firm, announced today two new additions to the team. Maria Karaivanova is joining Madrona as a Principal focused on sourcing and evaluating new investment opportunities, working with portfolio companies to explore and evaluate business strategies and developing investment themes for the firm. Alice Ryder is joining as Director of Investor Relations and Business Development and will work with Madrona’s investors, as well as continue to develop Madrona’s program for connecting C-level executives with portfolio companies for partnerships, customer relationships and advisory roles. Each brings a deep background of business, technology and finance experience to the firm, and has helped rapidly scale very successful businesses like Cloudflare, King Digital and Clearwire.

“Both Maria and Alice embody what we look for at Madrona, experts in their field who have a passion for working effectively with entrepreneurs and innovative ideas,” said Tim Porter, managing director, Madrona. “While they have been on board just a short time, each of them has already made meaningful contributions, and we are looking forward to working together in the coming years.”

Maria has nearly a decade of deep technology experience, garnered through roles at some of the world’s leading technology companies, including Cloudflare, Intel and Boeing. Maria comes to Madrona after five years as head of business development and an executive team member at Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based web performance and security company, where she helped build the company from 25 employees to unicorn status.

While at Cloudflare, Maria built a global ecosystem of over five thousand partners and launched strategic partnerships with Google, Rackspace and other leading cloud platforms, delivering significant revenue and distribution. Prior to Cloudflare, Maria was an investor at Intel Capital with a focus on enterprise technologies and cloud security. She was also part of the Intel-McAfee strategic engagement team helping to integrate security into firmware. Before that, Maria held various positions at Boeing specializing in intellectual property management and international business development for the Chinook, Apache and F-15 programs, and unmanned aircraft. She started her career as an analyst at Citibank.

“Seattle has emerged as the cloud capital of the world and Madrona Venture Group is at the core of its innovation fabric,” commented Maria. “I couldn’t be more excited to work alongside the Madrona team to bring innovative ideas to life across the Pacific Northwest and to support the remarkable entrepreneurs across our portfolio.”

Maria has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSBA in Finance with high honors from Saint Louis University. She is a frequent speaker at technology conferences and an occasional angel investor. Maria lives in Seattle with her husband and son.

As Director of Investor Relations, Alice Ryder will work with Madrona’s limited partners who have invested nearly $1.3 billion into funds that are more than 85% invested in the Pacific Northwest. Additionally, she will help foster business development by continuing to build out the C-suite program that connects CIOs, CTOs and CEOs with Madrona portfolio companies. Through this program over the past two years, portfolio companies have engaged new customers and made valuable partnerships with national brand name companies. Alice comes to this role with a strong background in finance and partnerships, built over 10 years in companies representing a diverse set of businesses in the technology industry.

Alice was most recently VP of Investor Relations at King Digital Entertainment, the maker of Candy Crush and other successful mobile games, where she helped ready the company for its IPO and worked closely with King’s global investor base through its public life, which culminated in a $5.9 billion sale to Activision Blizzard. Prior to King she was VP of Investor Relations for Clearwire. She has also held similar roles at Expedia and Nextel Partners. Alice began her work in technology investing as a banker at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.

“I’m excited to dive into the world of venture investing which is so important to the continuing growth of the technology industry,” said Alice. “The Pacific NW is full of engineering, entrepreneurial and business talent from wireless to software to infrastructure, and Madrona is at the center of it all. I’m looking forward to working with the team to help create new opportunities for growth in the area.”

Alice holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BS in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

About Madrona Venture Group

Madrona (www.madrona.com) has been investing in early-stage technology companies in the Pacific Northwest since 1995 and has been privileged to play a role in some of the region’s most successful technology ventures. The firm invests predominately in seed and Series A rounds across the information technology spectrum, including consumer Internet, commercial software and services, digital media and advertising, networking and cloud computing, and mobile. Madrona manages approximately $1 billion and was an early investor in companies such as Amazon.com, Apptio, Rover.com, and Redfin.

Microsoft Bookings is a web-based Office 365 app that businesses can use to manage appointments made by their customers, and is designed to make it easier to track clients, create new appointments, assign employees to specific appointments, set up reminder emails, and more. At the time of the original launch, Microsoft said that mobile apps would follow in the future. That future is now here with apps available for iOS and Android. The apps enable users to book and check appointments, as well as contact customers and get directions to meetings, directly from their smartphone.

Under Satya Nadella’s guidance, Microsoft has been pushing to reinvent itself as a cloud- and mobile-focused productivity and platform company, and building new apps and services such as Bookings fits squarely into that game plan. It also gives businesses one more reason to remain within the Office 365 ecosystem of services — the stickier a platform is, the harder it is for businesses to leave.

So far, Bookings has only been available in the U.S. and Canada, but it was only a matter of time before it was brought to an international user base. The company hasn’t given a precise launch schedule for Bookings internationally, but it does say that it’s “beginning to” roll it out as of now.

In additional to the new mobile apps and global availability, Bookings has also gained a number of new features, including the ability to add your Office 365 calendar to the Bookings app, a somewhat surprising omission from the initial launch; users can also now add some “buffer time” for before and after appointments to allow time to prepare, travel, and so on.

Microsoft today announced that its desktop email and calendar app Outlook 2016 for Mac now supports the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar display. Office 365 subscribers and Office 2016 for Mac customers can use the new feature on compatible devices. Microsoft added Touch Bar support in preview earlier this month.

“The Touch Bar in Outlook intelligently provides quick access to the most commonly used commands as you work on email and manage your calendar. When composing a new mail or meeting request, the Touch Bar displays the common formatting options,” the Outlook team wrote in a blog post. “When viewing your calendar, you can switch between different views. And when viewing the reminders window, you can join an online meeting with one tap on the Touch Bar.”

Adobe, Google, and Spotify, among others, have added Touch Bar support to their existing Mac apps.

Also today Microsoft announced that add-ins are now becoming available in Outlook 2016 for Mac, after they showed up for Office Insiders. Customers with Exchange 2013 Service Pack 1 or higher, Office 365 subscriptions, or Outlook.com mailboxes can use the add-ins. They’re accessible in the Office Store. “You just need to install add-ins once and they will be available for use across Outlook on the web, Windows, Mac and iOS,” the Outlook team said.

Instagram Stories received live video support in January, but it provided an ephemeral experience, disappearing after 24 hours. While you could save recorded photos and videos since December, live video was an exception. But on Monday, Instagram added a feature that lets you hold onto your live broadcast and rewatch it later on.

Above: Live video within Instagram Stories.

Image Credit: Instagram

After you’ve completed a live video, you can either leave it on Instagram Stories and watch it disappear, or if it was really engaging and worth remembering later on, tap on the “Save” button in the upper right corner.

Only the video will be stored, not the comments, likes, number of viewers, or even the live interactions that take place. The video will be saved to your phone’s camera roll and you can then share it to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or anywhere else you’d like. But be warned: Instagram said that when you do so, the video “will no longer be available in the app,” so be careful when you retrieve it.

With the introduction of live video, perhaps the idea was to highlight things and events not necessarily worth memorable, at least in the long term. Maybe you wanted to record a parade, animals hanging out, you’re just bored one afternoon, or perhaps you’re a creative person and just want to show how you design something. With the proliferation of live video and stories into all Facebook properties, including WhatsApp, Messenger, and even the core Facebook app, the ephemeral functionality is intended to not only rip off more of Snapchat, but to appeal to users in different settings.

Instagram claims that this is the “first of many improvements” it plans on making to live videos this year. It did not specify how many people used live video or provide any updated numbers on Instagram Stories usage.

The save update is part of the latest release of Instagram for iOS and Android.

Netmarble also has a huge hit on its hands with Lineage2: Revolution, a mobile game that made more than $176 million in revenues in its first month in South Korea. Netmarble is preparing to launch the game in other markets beyond South Korea.

Above: Marvel Contest of Champions has generated more than $200M in revenue.

Image Credit: Kabam

The company plans to sell 17 million shares at a price range of 121,000 South Korean won to 157,000 won, Netmarble said in a filing yesterday. Final pricing will be announced on April 24.

Bang Jun-hyuk started the company in 2000 with 100 million won of capital (about $90,000), and the company is now the ninth-largest game publisher in the world, according to App Annie.

NH Investment & Securities Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are the lead management firms for the IPO. Korea Investment and Securities Co. and Citigroup Inc. are managers. Bang sold a stake in Netmarble to South Korea’s CJ in 2004. He quit in 2006 with health problems, and he returned after a five-year break.

He is now the largest shareholder with 30.6 percent ownership, while CJ holds 27.6 percent and Tencent Holdings has 22 percent. Part of the money raised from the IPO will be used to pay down debts of 897 billion won, while 1 trillion won would be used for deals and investments. The company wants to be among the top five global game companies by 2020.

In 2015, Netmarble invested $130 million in Jam City, formerly known as SGN. Netmarble’s Kabam division has recently had troubles with a flawed update to Marvel: Contest of Champions. The update was widely criticized and triggered a boycott by players. The game is still ranked No. 19 on App Annie’s top-grossing mobile games list on iOS.

The company says Model allows people to become their own graphic designer within one simple app.

The Model app lets people augment reality with graphics that have been used by photographers to create art portraits of professional models. The effects include “dissolve,” “image glow,” and “transparency.”

Above: Now you can say, “I did this artwork myself,” with Tipit’s Model.

Image Credit: Tipit

Model showcases the image processing graphics that Tipit offers professional developers in its software development kit, including filters that the user can manipulate to suit their own personal taste. The capabilities encompass a variety of realistic effects, including advanced image filters and “green screen” effects.

The graphics are developed using Tipit’s segmentation technology, which enables the app to accurately separate an image from the background. This segmented technology gives an accurate, crisp and realistic image separation from the background, which allows an AR feel in still images without their being in “real time.”

Additionally, the graphics are part of an automatic photo editing procedure that has not been seen before. Tipit said the graphics and editing capabilities that consumers will have is equivalent to the expensive features that professional photographers use in Photoshop, Illustrator, and other similar products.

Above: Tipit’s Model lets you do special effects.

Image Credit: Tipit

Tipit’s graphics designer is used to create and apply different layers on the background and foreground, which creates an automatic edited effect. The photos created with Model can be saved on multiple platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, or a phone camera roll.

“Model demonstrates the innovative image processing graphics that can be created with the Tipit SDK and our graphics designer studio,” said CEO Jonathan Rimon, in a statement. “This utilization for consumers as well as developers and brands truly illustrates how all of our graphics can seamlessly integrate into various social media platforms, providing an enhanced experience for all.”

Akeneo has raised $13 million to expand its product information management software for ecommerce companies.

The round comes from Partech Ventures and Alven Capital. Founded in France in 2013 and now based in Boston, Akeneo provides open-source software for managing products akin to customer relationship management software.

The Akeneo PIM solution also makes it possible to scale and customize ecommerce initiatives far more rapidly.

“We work with many brands and distributors that are in the process of moving their operations definitively into the ecommerce world,” said Akeneo CEO and cofounder Frédéric de Gombert, in a statement. ”Our belief is that there cannot be effective and lasting digital transformation if it does not include product data quality as a core focus.”

Above: Akeneo’s product information management software.

Image Credit: Akeneo

Akeneo was cofounded by four entrepreneurs with deep backgrounds in ecommerce. The cofounders include three French entrepreneurs — CEO Frédéric de Gombert, engineering lead Nicolas Dupont, and CTO Benoit Jacquemont — and one American, Yoav Kutner. Kutner was a cofounder of Magento, a leading global ecommerce platform that was purchased by Ebay in 2011.

Investor Roy Rubin, a former CEO and cofounder of Magento, also joined the Akeneo board in 2016.

Partech Ventures is the majority investor in the new funding round, and it sees strategic PIM as a growing competitive advantage for ecommerce players.

“With the boom of product offers and distribution channels, managing product data is a major issue with a measurable impact on sellers’ turnovers,” said Partech partner Reza Malekzadeh, in a statement. “Akeneo’s exceptional model, its great international relevance, and the ambitious vision and effective performance of its team have us utterly convinced that it is about to set a new standard on the product data management market.”

Like Magento, Akeneo adopted an open source model, making the basic version of its software available free to anyone online. Thus far, 40,000 businesses have downloaded the software — an average of more than one per hour worldwide. The premium version is already being used by more than 120 global brands, including Samsung, Adidas, Universal Music Group, Made.com, Nuxe, and Carrefour.

“Due to our continued confidence in the talented founders of Akeneo and their amazing team, we decided to support this round of funding to enable the company to accelerate their international operations and to continue on the path to disrupt the PIM market,” commented Jeremy Uzan, partner at Alven Capital, in a statement.

Akeneo plans to use the new funding to double its R&D team and accelerate international sales.

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